Nigella Lawson: Indulging in the Decadent Pleasures of Words and Food
Literature, to me, is like chocolate, a passionate indulgence worth carving time out of a busy schedule to savor slowly. This month I stretch the boundaries of literature to discuss a cookbook (yes, the British culinary arts extend past bangers and crisps) by British writer, journalist, and self-avowed food lover Nigella Lawson. How to Eat is not simply a cookbook but also a literary treatise on how to appreciate your food and how to develop the confidence to experiment successfully with the foodstuff that goes into your food. Nigella shares her advice and guidelines in prose worth savoring, along with the recipes, for its wit, honesty, insight and simplicity.
I discovered the book after becoming enamored with her cooking show Nigella Bites, which the BBC has licensed to the E! Entertainment channel. In New England, the show, taped over a number of weeks in Nigella's own kitchen, airs on Saturday mornings at eleven. If you're easily beguiled, as I am, with accents or foreign jargon, you will not be able to use a blender after watching her show without thinking, time to "blitz." Each week, recipes are shaped around a theme (trash food, comfort food, holiday food, etc.), and most of the menus are geared toward saving time and energy, which are better spent appreciating the food and the company. As testimony to this philosophy, each show ends with Nigella and a table of friends enjoying the fruits of her labor, or, more appropriately, her love.
What qualifies this former literature student as an authority on cooking? In the introduction to How to Eat, she makes no effort to disguise her credentials: "I am not a chef. I am not even a trained or professional cook. My qualification is as an eater. I cook what I want to eat – within limits" (ix). Nigella was a restaurant critic, too, so she does not come exactly sans credentials, but as she makes clear, a love of food is essential for successful cooking: "I don’t believe you can every really cook unless you love eating" (viii).
In this advice I hear the words of a reader and writer as well as an eater. Toss in a few synonyms and you have a writer’s maxim: I don’t believe you can every really write unless you love reading. (Zadie Smith, who at twenty-four published her award winning White Teeth, credits her success to reading, not to nuggets of wisdom imparted in any writing course. Hence, loving the end result before practising the technique is advice worth considering either in the kitchen or at the computer.)
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